First off, he labeled the whole experience an “unfair, arbitrary, and sadistic top ten practice,” and it proved extremely difficult for him to limit his choices to only ten films that helped to influence his storied career. In fact, we'd say it's hard to pinpoint any single director's influence on the extremely original work of Del Toro. So instead of crediting any movie or director, he decided to list his twenty choices as “thematic/authorial pairings.”

Most of the films can be found on FilmStruck, as they have much of Criterion's library available for subscribers. Check out the full list and snippets of Del Toro's commentary on how they thematically influenced his films below.

Bergman as a fabulist—my favorite—is absolutely mesmerizing. These two films have the primal pulse of a children’s fable told by an impossibly old and wise narrator...Both tales are ripe with fantastical imagery and a sharp sense of the uncanny.

These films are gorgeous, dark poems about fragility and horror. Both fables depend on sublime, almost ethereal, imagery to convey a sense of doom and loss: mad, fragile love clinging for dear life in a maelstrom of darkness.

Gilliam is a fabulist pregnant with images—exploding with them, actually—and fierce, untamed imagination. He understands that 'bad taste' is the ultimate declaration of independence from the discreet charm of the bourgeoisie. He jumps with no safety net and drags us with him into a world made coherent only by his undying faith in the tale he is telling.

Both are perfect fables rooted in Japanese folklore but distinctly modern in their approach to violence and sexuality. As exuberant and exquisite as a netsuke carving, these atmospheric jewels show mankind trapped in a cosmically evil world.

The two supreme works of childhood/horror. Lamentations of worlds lost and the innocents trapped in them. Sublime fairy tales of despair that depict the adult world as a toxic environment for kids to exist in.

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